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What does THEORIES do?

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Gopa B. Caesar:
Literary theory  is “speculative discourse on literature and on practice of literature.”It may include reflections on or analysis of general principles and categories of literature, such as its nature and function; its relation to other aspects of culture; the purpose, procedures and validity of literary criticism; relation of literary text to their authors and historical contexts; or the production of literary meaning.(Zhu Gang )
   Approaches,schools and groups
   Scientism Approaches
•   Russian Formalism
•   Anglo-American New Criticism
•   Czech Structuralism
•   French Structuralism
•   Post Structuralism
   Humanism Approaches
•   Existentialism
•   Psychoanalysis Criticism
•   Phenomenological Criticism
•   Hermeneutics Criticism
•   Reader-Response Criticism
•   Feminism Criticism
   Historical Approaches
•   Marxist Criticism
•   New Historicism
•   Cultural Studies
•   Post-Colonial Criticism
   Characters:
   Theorized: almost all of the schools of criticism have their particular theory.
   Adapting theories or principles from their disciplines.
   Understanding literature in terms of its relations to history, politics gender, social class, race, mythology or psychology.
   Critical tendency: many schools of criticism seek to influence on the social reality within their historical context.

Gopa B. Caesar:
Part  2    The New Criticism
Times:
     There are four periods:the initiative(1910-1930),the formative(1930-1945), the dominant(1945-1957), and normalization(1960s to the present). If we take T.E. Hume, a British aesthetician, or American poet Ezra Pound as the initiator of the New Criticism, then this school started in the 1910s.But the New Criticism rose formally in the 1930s when some critics established their theory in America, and it became dominant criticism system in college and university English departments in the 1950s.
Members:
Founders:
I.A.Richards(1883--1981)
T.S.Eliot(1888--1965)
W.Empson.(1906--1984)

Masters:
John Crowe Ransom(1888--1974)
Allen Tate(1888--1979)
Robert Penn Warren(1905--)
Cleanth Brooks(1906--1994)
W.K.Wimsatt(1907--1975)
Rene Wellek(1903--1995)
Works:
I.A Richards:
Principles of Literary Criticism(1924)
Practical Criticism:A sturdy of Literary Judgment.(1929)
T.S.Eliot:
Tradition and the Individual Talent.(1917)
William Empson:
Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
John Crowe Ransom:
Poetry:A Note in Ontology.(1934)
The New Criticism(1941)
Allen Tate:
Tension in Poetry(1938)

Cleanth Brooks:
The Language of Paradox(1942)
The Well-wrought Urn.(1947)
Understanding Poetry.(1938,with Robert Penn Warren)
Understanding fiction.(1943,with Robert Penn Warren)
Understanding Drama(1945,with Robert B.Heilman)
W.K.Wimsatt:
The Verbal Icon(1954)
The Intentional Fallacy(1946,with M.C. Beardsley)
The Affective fallacy(1949,with M.C. Beardsley)

R.Wellek:
Theory of Literature(1949,with Austin Warren)
History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950(1986)

Gopa B. Caesar:
Ideas:

  The New Critics read the individual work of literary art as an organic form.They articulated the concept that in an organic form there is a consistency and an internal vitality that we should look for and appreciate.

  One of the most salient considerations of the New Critics was emphasis on form,on the work of art as an object.
The New Critics sought precision and structural tightness in the literary work;they favored a style and tone that tended toward irony;they insisted on the presence within the work of everything necessary for its analysis;and they called for an end to a concern by critics with matters outside the work itself--the life of the author,the history of his times,or the social and economic implications of the literary work.

Gopa B. Caesar:
Keywords:
Close reading:
     A reading method that is the mark of the New Criticism, which takes work as a piece of textured literary art, and only read the work itself. Close reading begins with sensitivity to the words of the text and all their denotative and connotative values and implications, then looks for structures, patterns and interrelationships in the text.
Tension:   
     A reading strategy offered by Allen Tate in 1938, that means a combination of extension and intension. It is also a New Critical standard for evaluating poetry and poets.

Irony:   
      Irony involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. To I. A. Richards irony is bringing opposites to form a balance, while C. Brooks suggested irony is the stability of a context in which the internal pressures balance and mutually support each other.   

The intentional fallacy:

      A particular term proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley who argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and that a literary work,once published,belongs in the public realm of language,which gives it an objective existence distinct from the author’s original idea of it.

The affective fallacy:

       The affective fallacy is proposed by Wimsatt and Beardsley that means a confusion between the poem and its results(what it is and what it does), It begins by trying to drive the standard of criticism from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impressionism and relativism.The outcome of either fallacy,the intentional or the affective,is that the poem itself,as an object of specifically critical judgment,tends to disappear.

Gopa B. Caesar:
Part  3    The Psychoanalytical Criticism

Times:       
      Started from 1900 when S.Freud published his The Interpretation of Dreams, then extended to present.There are two important stages in the course of psychoanalytical criticism development. First is the phase of Freud. Second is the phase of Jacque Lacan.

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